The Prius is often the butt of automotive jokes for its oddball styling, pokey acceleration, and tree-hugging persona, but it appears that Toyota is having the last laugh -- at least in California. When the sales numbers were tallied up for 2012, the Prius reigned supreme as the best-selling vehicle in California with 60,688 units sold. In fact, over one-quarter of all Prii sold in the United States for 2012 were purchased in California.

Economical cars from Toyota and Honda made up the top five sold cars in California with the Civic, Camry, Accord, and Corolla taking second, third, fourth, and fifth place respectively. The Ford F-Series, which is the best-selling vehicle for the entire United States, only managed to place seventh on the sales list in California.

Toyota's Prius is rated at 51/48/50 (city/highway/combined), which makes it a perfect fit for California's congested highways.

“Environmental consciousness and changing trends are large contributors,” said Peter Welch, Chief Executive of the California New Car Dealers Association. “Eight years ago everyone was driving sport utilities and trucks, now it’s almost trendy to drive a fuel-efficient hybrid or plug-in.”

Toyota's Prius may be sitting high on its throne right now, but there are plenty of challengers to its hybrid dominance. Volkswagen is looking to win over some consumers who aren't sold on its TDI diesel engines with the Jetta Hybrid, and Ford has two competent hybrids -- the Fusion Hybrid and the C-MAX -- in its stable that promise 47 mpg combined (although real world results suggest otherwise).

All three of the aforementioned models achieve lofty fuel economy numbers with conventional styling that is more appealing to the masses.

quote: Also the bay area is where you want to be if you work in tech. No other place in the US has anywhere near the job market.

It definitely has a great job market and I was really impressed when I went out there and saw all these huge computer companies that I heard about every day.

The downside is the housing market. When you go home from work where are you going to live? For instance, take Steve Jobs' modest house growing up. This is the stereotypical suburban Californian home from the 50's

My house in PA is much bigger, I have about 4 times the amount of land, and to top if all off it's about a sixth of the price of the houses in that development. There are plenty of tech places to work around here although not nearly as many as out there.

My point is that there's more places to work out there but it's more difficult to build a life because you'll never be able to make up for the price of housing. The end result is that your standard of living will be lower.

quote: Wow, and I thought I didn't get much of a deal when I bought my house with three acres of land for $42k.

Dude I'm in the desert where it seems no one in CA wants to live and my 2000sf house on 2.5 acres costs just over $300k (today's prices...bought in 05, it was $400k then). Go 30 mins south and my same house/land is $700k. 30 more mins and it's over $1 million. We sold a horse a couple of years ago. The buyers could not believe how "cheap" our house was. In their town (Camarillo), our place would cost $8 million easy.